Cornered, betrayed, and outgunned, Mo Chen did the only thing she could do. She escalated.
She called Silas. "It's time for the failsafe."
The failsafe was a plan she and Silas had devised for a worst-case scenario. Using the last of the consortium's intelligence before she cut all ties, she had identified the single most critical, most heavily fortified Kraken asset: their primary data center, buried deep beneath a mountain in Switzerland. It was the brain of the Kraken, housing all their contracts, financial records, and the identities of their clients and operatives.
Destroying it would cripple them permanently.
But it was impregnable. Conventional assault was impossible. The [Scorched Earth Protocol] had a cooldown, and she didn't have a million dollars left in her personal account after the recent attacks.
So, she decided to burn it herself.
She gathered every remaining asset she had—the profits from her market plays, the remaining salvage from the Thorne empire, the valuable research from her materials lab. She liquidated it all, converting it into a single, physical asset: a massive, industrial-grade thermal lance, a mining tool designed to cut through rock using superheated plasma. It was the perfect channel for her [Immolate] ability.
She was going to burn her way into the mountain.
It was a suicide mission. But the Phoenix was born for fire. If she was going to die, she would die turning her enemy's fortress into their tomb.
She looked at the thermal lance, a weapon of unimaginable cost and destructive potential. It was the biggest physical asset she had ever owned.
And she was going to use it to burn a hole straight into hell.